Personalism

Although it was only in the first half of the twentieth century
that the term personalism became known as a designation of
philosophical schools and systems, personalist thought had developed
throughout the nineteenth century as a reaction to perceived
depersonalizing elements in Enlightenment rationalism, pantheism,
Hegelian absolute idealism, individualism as well as collectivism
in politics, and materialist, psychological, and evolutionary
determinism. In its various strains, personalism always underscores
the centrality of the person as the primary locus of investigation for
philosophical, theological, and humanistic studies. It is an approach
or system of thought which regards or tends to regard the person as
the ultimate explanatory, epistemological, ontological, and axiological
principle of all reality, although these areas of thought are not
stressed equally by all personalists and there is tension between
idealist, phenomenological, existentialist, and Thomist versions of
personalism.

Personalism exists in many different versions, and this makes it
somewhat difficult to define as a philosophical and theological
movement. Many philosophical schools have at their core one particular
thinker or even one central work which serves as a canonical
touchstone. Personalism is a more diffused and eclectic movement and
has no such universal reference point. It is, in point of fact, more
proper to speak of many
personalisms than one personalism. In 1947 Jacques Maritain
could write that there are at least “a dozen personalist
doctrines, which at times have nothing more in common than the word
‘person.’” Moreover, because of their emphasis on the
subjectivity of the person and their ties to phenomenology and
existentialism, some dominant forms of personalism have not lent
themselves to systematic treatises.

It is perhaps more proper to speak of personalism as a
“current” or a broader “worldview”, since it
represents more than one school or one doctrine while at the same time
the most important forms of personalism do display some central and
essential commonalities. Most important of the latter is the general
affirmation of the centrality of the person for philosophical
thought. Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood
— human as well as (at least for most personalists) divine. It
emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the
person, as well as the person's essentially relational or
communitarian dimension. The title “personalism” can
therefore legitimately be applied to any school of thought that
focuses on the reality of persons and their unique status among beings
in general, and personalists normally acknowledge the indirect
contributions of a wide range of thinkers throughout the history of
philosophy who did not regard themselves as personalists. Personalists
believe that the human person should be the ontological and
epistemological starting point of philosophical reflection. They are
concerned to investigate the experience, the status, and the dignity
of the human being as person, and regard this as the starting-point
for all subsequent philosophical analysis.

Personalists regard personhood (or “personality”) as the
fundamental notion, as that which gives meaning to all of reality and
constitutes its supreme value. Personhood carries with it an
inviolable dignity that merits unconditional respect. Personalism has
for the most part not been primarily a theoretical philosophy of the
person. Although it does defend a unique theoretical understanding of
the person, this understanding is in itself such as to support the
prioritization of moral philosophy, while at the same time the moral
experience of the person is such as to decisively determine the
theoretical understanding. For personalists, a person combines
subjectivity and objectivity, causal activity and receptivity, unicity
and relation, identity and creativity. Stressing the moral nature of
the person, or the person as the subject and object of free activity,
personalism tends to focus on practical, moral action and ethical
questions.

Some personalists are idealists, believing that reality is constituted
by consciousness, while others claim to be realist philosophers and
argue that the natural order is created by God independently of human
consciousness. For taxonomic convenience, the many strains of
personalism can be grouped into two fundamental categories:
personalism in a strict sense and personalism in a broader
sense. Strict personalism places the person at the center of a
philosophical system that originates from an “intuition”
of the person himself, and then goes on to analyse the personal
reality and the personal experience that are the objects of this
intuition. The method of the main twentieth-century European version
of this strict personalism draws extensively from phenomenology and
existentialism, departing from traditional metaphysics and
constituting a separate philosophical system. In the idealistic
version of personalism, it becomes more obvious, however, that the
deeper sources of strict personalism are to be found primarily in the
early critical reception of German idealism and in some aspects of
moral sense philosophy. The original intuition is really that of
self-awareness, by which one grasps not least values and essential
meanings through unmediated experience. The knowledge produced by
reflecting on this experience is nothing more than an explicitation of
the original intuition, which in turn generates an awareness of a
framework for moral action. The intuition of the person as the center
of values and meaning is not exhausted, however, in phenomenological
or existential analyses. These analyses point beyond themselves,
indicating a constitutive transcendence of the person himself,
irreducible either to its specific manifestations or to the sum-total
of those manifestations. Despite their differences, both the American
school of Bowne and his first followers and the European personalism
of Emmanuel Mounier represent personalism in this strict sense.

Personalism in the broader sense does not consider the person as the
object of an original intuition, nor does it conceive of philosophical
research as beginning with an analysis of immediate personal
experience and its context. Rather, in the scope of a general
metaphysics the person manifests his singular value and essential
role. Thus the person occupies the central place in philosophical
discourse, but this discourse is not reduced to an explicitation or
development of an original intuition of the person. The person does
not justify metaphysics but rather metaphysics justifies the person
and his various operations. Instead of constituting an autonomous
metaphysics, personalism in the broader sense offers an
anthropological-ontological shift in perspective within an existing
metaphysics and draws out the ethical consequences of this
shift. Perhaps the best known strain of personalism in the broad sense
is so-called “Thomistic personalism.” Represented by such
figures as Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, Étienne Gilson, Robert
Spaemann, and Karol Wojtyła, Thomistic personalism draws on
principles of Thomas Aquinas's philosophical and theological
anthropology in what it sees as a coherent development of inchoate
elements of Aquinas's thought.

As a philosophical school, personalism draws its foundations from
human reason and experience, though historically personalism has
nearly always been attached to Biblical theism. von Balthasar suggests
that “Without the biblical background it [personalism] is
inconceivable.” Yet while most personalists are theists, belief
in God is not necessary to all personalist philosophies, and some
profess an atheist personalism.

Though generally
considered a philosophical school, the personalist approach is often
applied to other disciplines as well, yielding a plethora of titles
such as theological personalism, economic personalism, ecological
personalism and psychological personalism (along with their inversions:
“personalistic theology,” “personalistic
economics,” “personalistic psychology”) and so
forth.

The term “personalism” made its world debut in Germany,
where “der Personalismus” was first used by F. D. E.
Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in his book Über die
Religion in 1799. Amos Bronson Alcott seems to have been the
first American to use the term, calling it in an 1863 essay “the
doctrine that the ultimate reality of the world is a Divine Person who
sustains the universe by a continuous act of creative will.” The
term “American personalism” was coined by Walt Whitman
(1819–1892) in his essay “Personalism,” which was
published in The Galaxy in May 1868. In 1903 Charles
Renouvier published Le Personnalisme, thereby introducing the
word into the French as well. The word “personalism” first
appeared as an encyclopedic entry in Volume IX of Hastings's
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics in 1915 in an article by
Ralph T. Flewelling.

According to Albert C. Knudson, personalism is “the ripe fruit
of more than two millenniums of intellectual toil, the apex of a
pyramid whose base was laid by Plato and Aristotle.”
Catholic personalists emphasize more specifically
the decisive role of medieval thought, and in particular scholasticism,
for the development of personalism. Étienne Gilson, for
instance, has observed that where Plato locates the center of reality
in ideas with concrete instantiations of these being merely accidental,
and Aristotle places emphasis not on numerical individuals but on the
universal specific form, Thomas Aquinas saw the individual person as
unique among beings because of reason and self-mastery. Though none
goes so far as to call Aquinas a personalist, some suggest that he
furnished the necessary soil in which personalistic theory could take
root. In this regard, Karol Wojtyła wrote that Aquinas
“provided at least a point of departure for personalism in
general.”

The term
person comes from the Latin persona, whose origins
are traceable to Greek drama, where the
πρόσωπον, or mask,
became identified with the role an actor would assume in a given
production. Such usage is carried over today in the word
“persona,” referring to characters in fictional literature
or drama, or second identities which people adopt for behavior in given
social contexts. Its introduction into the mainstream of intellectual
parlance, however, came with theological discourse during the patristic
period, notably the attempts to clarify or define central truths of the
Christian faith. These discussions focused primarily on two
doctrines: the Trinity (three “persons” in one God) and the
incarnation of the second person of the Trinity (the
“hypostatic” union of two natures—divine and
human—in one “person”). Confusion marred these
discussions because of ambiguities in the philosophical and theological
terminology, such that, for example, the thesis — ascribed to Sabellius
— would be advanced that in God there was one
ύπόστασις and
three πρόσωπα, where
ύπόστασις
conveyed the meaning of “person” and
πρόσωπα bore the sense of
“roles” or “modes” of being. In order to
present these mysteries with precision, the concept of person and the
relationship of person to nature needed clarification. The debates
culminated in the First Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council
of Constantinople (381), and in the drafting and propagation of the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

Though the concept of person first developed in this theological
context, with reference to the persons of the Trinity, the general
Greek philosophical concepts involved in these Trinitological origins
facilitated its application to human beings as well. Philosophical
personalism may or may not appropriate the theological suppositions
with which the early usage of the term “person” is
laden. The classic, basic, and purely philosophical definition which
is still accepted by personalists, as far as it goes, was given early
on by Boethius (ca. 480–524): “persona est naturae
rationalis individua substantia.” This definition consists of
two parts. The essential starting point is a subsistent individual: a
singular, existing suppositum or
ύπόστασις. Here the
adjective “individual” distinguishes an existing substance
from common or second substance. The second element of the
definition—naturae rationalis—qualifies the
notion of individual substance: the person is an individual possessing
a
rational nature. It is this rational, spiritual nature that
gives rise to the different qualities that distinguish the person,
qualities to which personalists attach decisive importance.

The Trinitological concept of the person was far from the modern
meaning that the term assumes in personalism, and Boethius' definition
too indicates only in the barest abstract outline the deep and
comprehensive signification that personalism ascribes to it. As
accepted by personalism, it is the result of a long and complex
cumulative development, resulting in a rich, if somewhat elusive,
concept which in some respects wholly inverts the original
connotations of exteriority in the early meanings of
“mask” and “role”: person comes rather to
denote the innermost spiritual and most authentic kernel of the unique
individual. Already in the course of the Middle Ages, further
definitions were provided, and not just by Aquinas. Not least the
Augustinian example of experienced interiority and reflexivity, the
idea of form as the principle of individuation, and the late medieval
and Franciscan emphasis on will and singularity entered into early
modern thinking about the person, and combined with the stronger focus
on human personality that was characteristic of Renaissance
humanism.

Along these lines, the early modern concepts of subjectivity and
self-consciousness added new elements to the definition and
understanding of the central concept in personalism. Immanuel Kant's
epistemic dualism, underscoring the importance of both subject and
object in knowledge, opened the door both to the idealistic form of
personalism and to the phenomenology and existentialism that became so
important for twentieth-century personalism. Kant also contributed
significantly to the personalist understanding of human
dignity. Unlike Hobbes, for whom “the worth of a man” is
“his price,” and dignity is “the publique worth of a
man,” Kant regarded dignity as “intrinsic worth”. He
posited a dichotomy between price and dignity, whereby
“something that has a price can be exchanged for something else
of equal value; whereas that which exceeds all price and therefore
admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.” His celebrated
practical categorical imperative—Act so as to treat
humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as
an end and never as a means only—was incorporated nearly
verbatim into Karol Wojtyła's “personalist principle.”

Personalism in the sense of a distinct philosophy or worldview
focusing on the full, accumulated import of the concept of the person,
however, emerged only in the context of the broad critical reaction
against what can be called the various impersonalistic
philosophies which came to dominate the Enlightenment and Romanticism
in the form of rationalistic and romantic forms of pantheism and
idealism, from Spinoza to Hegel. Key figures in this reaction were
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), the initiator of the
so-called Pantheismusstreit in the 1780s, and
F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), who in his later work rejected
the impersonalist positions of his early idealist systems. But these
were only the most important figures in a broad movement that included
many other philosophers, primarily the so-called speculative theists,
as well as theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The modified
idealistic, theistic personalism developed in this counter-movement
became decisive, not least via its late German representative, Rudolph
Hermann Lotze (1817–81), not only for the American, idealistic
personalism of Bowne, but also for the parallel, British idealistic
personalism whose leading representative was Andrew Seth
Pringle-Pattison (1856-1931). Although the continental European
personalists of the twentieth century would reject idealism and turn
instead to phenomenology, existentialism, and Thomism, the outline of
the personalistic criticism of impersonal modes of thought was already
clearly and consistently developed by the thinkers here mentioned,
ever since the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Personalism thus arose as a reaction to impersonalist modes of thought
which were perceived as dehumanizing. The impersonal dynamic of modern
pantheism and monism in both their rationalistic and Romantic forms
underlie many of the modern philosophies that personalism turns
against, idealistic as well as materialistic. The absolute idealism of
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) held that Kant's noumenal reality is
not an unknowable substratum of appearances, but a dynamic process,
which in thought and in reality passes from thesis to antithesis, and
finally resolves itself in synthesis. This process is absolute mind,
the state, religion, philosophy. Hegel's idealism saw history as an
unfolding of absolute spirit through a necessary dialectical process,
and this framework left little room for the freedom or significance of
individual persons. Through the Young Hegelians, this impersonalist
form of idealism was soon transformed into equally impersonalist forms
of materialism, culminating in Marxism, which regards the essence of
man as his true collectivity; impersonalist determinism, in the form
of Communism, decisively determined twentieth-century political
totalitarianism. In other thinkers, idealism tended to merge with
increasingly naturalistic forms of nationalism and racialism, giving
rise to other new political movements in the twentieth century that
elevated alternative collectivities above the person, such as national
socialism. Personalism always resisted the absorption of the
individual into the collectivity by asserting the inherent worth of
the singular person. The person should never be a mere means to an
end, subordinated to the will and purposes of another. The state
exists for persons, and not persons for the state. In this regard,
personalism stands as a foil to totalitarianisms that value persons
only for their worth to the community, and insists instead on their
inherent dignity. Thus R. T. Flewelling could write that “the
person is the supreme essence of democracy and hostile to
totalitarianisms of every sort.” Personalism's insistence on
personal freedom and responsibility, self-determination, creativity,
and subjectivity all bear out this deep-seated resistance to
collectivism.

Parallel to the development and transformation of Hegelianism, other
theories of human nature were developed in the course of the
nineteenth century that blurred or cancelled the distinction between
man and the rest of nature, and downplayed or denied man's unique
individual value, spiritual nature, and free will. These theories too,
directly or indirectly, contributed to twentieth-century
totalitarianism. The philosophical positivism of Auguste Comte
(1798–1857) affirmed as a historical law that every science (and
the human race itself) passes through three successive stages, the
theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, each superior to the
last. Comte insisted so much on the reality and predominance of
society that this became for him the true subject, while the
individual was regarded as an abstraction. Darwinism, in particular,
uprooted the classical understanding of human beings as essentially
superior to the rest of creation by offering a theory whereby man
would be simply the most advanced life form along an unbroken
continuum, and the difference between man and irrational animals would
merely be one of degree, not of kind.

The emerging personalist philosophy, however, rejected impersonalism
not only in the form of idealistic or materialistic determinism and
collectivism, but also in the form of the radical individualism that
was equally a product of modern rationalism and romanticism, and
which, through, for instance, certain forms of liberalism and
anarchism, was also characteristic of the nineteenth century. From the
beginning, personalism proclaimed in its own way the communitarian
values of solidarity and inter-relation. In their insistence on
inviolable dignity, personalists resisted a utilitarianism which would
make one person merely “useful” for another. Whereas
individualism seeks the self above all and views others as means to
one's own profit, personalism seeks to make of the self a gift to
another. “Thus,” Emmanuel Mounier later wrote, “if
the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the
individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his
decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspectives of
personal life.” Where individualism hopes to find personal
realization in self-interest, personalism asserts the absolute need
for openness to others, even as a condition for one's own
realization.

Karol Wojtyła characterized the two extremes of individualism and
collectivism in the following way: “On the one hand, persons may
easily place their own individual good above the common good of the
collectivity, attempting to subordinate the collectivity to themselves
and use it for their individual good. This is the error of
individualism, which gave rise to liberalism in modern history and to
capitalism in economics. On the other hand, society, in aiming at the
alleged good of the whole, may attempt to subordinate persons to
itself in such a way that the true good of persons is excluded and
they themselves fall prey to the collectivity. This is the error of
totalitarianism, which in modern times has borne the worst possible
fruit.”

The existentialism that gave such important impulses to much
continental European personalism in the twentieth century developed in
certain respects in the line of the later Shelling's philosophy, and
traces even of Jacobi's criticism of impersonal pantheism can be found
in it. With Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
opposed Hegel's idealism and underscored the value of the individual
person, both for philosophy and for life in general. He accused
idealism of emptying life of meaning by neglecting the reality of
human existence. Whereas Kierkegaard and later existentialists
(Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Blondel) focused on issues central to the
meaning of human existence (love, marriage, death, faith, morality,
etc.), other thinkers continued to focus on the more direct
exploration of the meaning and nature of the person himself, and it
was these thinkers that came to be known as, and to call themselves,
personalists.

The philosophy of Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844–1900) gave its
own, distinct expression to these themes, showing, as many of the
romantic poets and philosophers had done before him, and despite his
criticism of romanticism, that the new individualism was in reality
closely interrelated with the general impersonalism of the dominant
strain of romanticism: from the exaltation of the individualist ego,
the step was never far to its extinction in a larger impersonal whole
of any of the many available varieties. Modern individualism
represented no real challenge to the intellectual environment in which
man tended to be seen as a mere phenomenal being, easily assimilated
into nature, the impersonal principle of idealism, the unconscious,
the cosmic will, or the collectivities of the family, the state, the
nation, the social class. Man was a product of external forces, an
insignificant piece in a cosmic puzzle, without dignity, freedom,
responsibility, or fundamental existential significance. It was this
overall, many-faceted intellectual climate and development that
produced the personalist counter-movement throughout the nineteenth
century, a movement which, by drawing on other, alternative resources
in the thought of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as on the
classical, medieval Christian, and early modern legacy, sought to
rescue the unique position and status of the singular human
person.

The personalist Jean Lacroix is justified in declaring personalism to be an
“anti-ideology”, awoken by social and political situations
that are alienating to the human person; in the face of such
impersonalist forces, personalism reaffirms the absolute dignity and
interrelationality of the human person. Maritain, too, wrote of
personalism as “a phenomenon of reaction” against the
“two opposite errors” of totalitarianism and
individualism. Contrary to Hegelian collectivism and the fierce
individualism of Nietzsche's superman, these thinkers stressed both
the inviolable dignity of the individual person and at the same time
his social nature and essential relationality.

In the twentieth century personalists gathered especially around three
European centers of higher learning: Paris, Munich, and Lublin. Until
recently, the best known and most prolific of these three schools was
the Parisian group. Between the First and Second World Wars the
French personalist movement revolved around a monthly
journal, Esprit, founded by Emmanuel Mounier
(1905–1950) and a group of friends in 1932. In the face of
economic collapse and political and moral disorientation, these French
personalists proposed the human person as the criterion according to
which a solution to the crisis was to be fashioned. The new,
irreducible key to thought, especially regarding social organization,
was to be the human person. In his programmatic essay Refaire la
Renaissance, which appeared in the first issue
of Esprit, Mounier proposed the need to disassociate the
spiritual world from the debased, materialistic bourgeoisie. In
substance much in line with the late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century origins of personalism, Mounier, before the Second
World War, turned sharply against the impersonalistic development of
individualistic, parliamentary democracy and the mass culture that had
come to shape the countries of Western Europe. Both personalism's
nineteenth-century background and this fact about the leading
twentieth-century European personalist indicate that for personalism,
a simple, uncritical endorsement of liberal democracy is not a
sufficient guarantee against totalitarianism, since liberal democracy
too tends to absorb the impersonalist ideas and the deep, historical
impersonalist dynamic clearly perceived and anlysed by personalistic
thinkers long before Mounier.

Political and traditionalist religious reaction was not an alternative
for Mounier. There had to be a real revolution, consisting in the
creation of a new humanism, where the bourgeois ideal of
“having” would yield to Christian “being,” a
being in communion with others. The spiritual revolution envisioned by
Mounier was to be above all the work of committed witnesses to the
truth, who through their own interior renewal and living faith would
galvanize the masses into a new communal structure. Such a revolution
entailed a triple commitment: denunciation, meditation, and technical
planning. Underlying this program was Mounier's bold conception of
Christian experience, an experience of “tragic optimism,”
colored both by the drama of Christian existence and by the certainty
of eschatological victory. The Christian's most important virtue is
that of the heroic witness, far from the evasiveness or sentimentality
of other, eviscerated strains of Christianity. Thus Mounier's idea of
the Christian as the watchful athlete engaged in spiritual combat
provided a stark response to Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity as
a religion of the weak. His assertion that there is no true progress
without the dimension of transcendence countered the Marxist search
for an earthly paradise through class struggle. His acceptance of the
importance of psychology while reemphasizing man's freedom and
responsibility furnished an answer to Freud's instinct-centered
psychoanalysis.

Mounier's work attracted the attention of important French thinkers
such as Gabriel Marcel, Denis de Rougemont, and Jacques Maritain, who
through their research, lectures, and writings helped develop French
personalist thought. Maritain, who worked with Mounier for a number of
years, was responsible for bringing French personalism to the United
States. After the war, European personalism, led by Mounier himself,
adapted to and took a more uncritical view of liberal democracy, and
Maritain played a role in drafting the 1948 United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Like other Thomistic personalists,
Maritain criticized the frailty of certain widespread strains of
Scholasticism, and appealed to the important role of intuitive
experience in philosophy.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), though never
identifying himself as a personalist, shared many of the concerns and
interests dear to personalists, and both benefited from and
contributed to the development of personalistic thought in
France. Gabriel Marcel was one of Ricoeur's philosophical mentors, and
Ricoeur was also deeply influenced by his contact with Emmanuel
Mounier, especially in the postwar years, 1946-1951. He contributed
essays to Esprit as well as the journal Le Christianisme
social. Ricoeur drew on many of the themes most precious to
Mounier, such as the nature of human freedom and the centrality of the
human person vis-à-vis the state, though his own later
development of these themes departed considerably from Mounier's. He
also shared personalism's rejection of materialism and of Cartesian
dualism, and a rejection of abstractions in favor of concrete human
reality. Perhaps the single greatest element of Mounier's personalism
adopted by Ricoeur, in fact, was the impermissibility of withdrawal
from political and social engagement.

Personalism in Germany was closely wedded to another philosophical
school, phenomenology, developed by Austrian-born Edmund Husserl
(1859-1938). Like existentialism and French personalism,
phenomenological realism was a response to German idealism, though it
bore a distinctive focus on epistemological questions. In
his Logische Untersuchungen, published in 1900, Husserl laid
out his phenomenological method and suppositions, and through it he attracted the
first students of his school. The distinguishing characteristic of
phenomenology is not doctrinal, but methodological. Seeking to avoid
the imposition of preconceived notions or structures on reality,
phenomenology goes “back to the thing” (zurück
zum Gegenstand) by bracketing (epoché) all
philosophical presuppositions about the world, man, and the rest of
reality. This direct observation and consultation of reality eschews
the problems of deductive reasoning by focusing on the intellectual
act of intuition, or direct apprehension of reality. The eidetic
reduction focuses on the essential structures of what appears
(phenomenon), so that one is dealing neither with empirical
observation nor with a description of Platonic forms, but with the
phenomenon's meaning. Phenomenologists identified the object of
intuition as the essences of things, and in so doing sought to
overcome the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy as well as the
errors of positivism and nominalism.

Though in his later life Husserl leaned toward philosophical idealism,
in his earlier life and in Logische Untersuchungen he embraced
philosophical realism. A realist phenomenology stresses
phenomenology's contribution to perennial philosophy, and seeks to
explore through experience the ultimate structures of being. By going
back to the thing itself, phenomenology aimed at eluding the errors of
both empiricism (reducing reality to the measurable) and idealism
(rarefying reality into abstraction and subjectivism). Among Husserl's
students were Max Scheler (1874–1928), Dietrich von Hildebrand
(1889–1977), Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) and Edith Stein
(1891–1942), all of whom influenced the development of
personalist thought. Husserl's later turn to Idealism, which came
about in the 1920s, precipitated a break with many of his disciples,
who came to believe that he had abandoned his original commitment to
reconnect philosophical reflection and objective reality. They
therefore struck out on their own, each creating an original body of
work in pursuit of Husserl's original intention. Stein, for instance,
looked to phenomenological method as a complement to Thomism, and von
Hildebrand introduced phenomenology into ethics in a personalistic
synthesis.

The third and youngest of the three centers of European personalistic
thought grew up around the Catholic University of Lublin. After
studying with Husserl, Roman Ingarden took phenomenology and interest
in personalist topics back to his native Poland in the early 1940s,
and there he met a young priest by the name of Karol Wojtyła,
whom he encouraged to read Max Scheler. Wojtyła became interested
in Scheler's phenomenology and ended up doing his doctoral
dissertation on Scheler's ethics of values, which he presented in
1953. Having previously received an Aristotelian-Thomistic formation,
Wojtyła drew from his studies of the phenomenological method to
develop a creative and original personalistic synthesis, complementing
Thomistic metaphysics and anthropology with insights from
phenomenology. He subsequently took a post as professor of ethics at
the Theological Faculty of Krakow and Lublin's Catholic University,
where he founded the Polish personalist school. Wojtyła, who was
also influenced by the writings of another of Husserl's disciples, von
Hildebrand, produced two significant personalist books, Love and
Responsibility (1960) and The Acting Person (1962), as
well as numerous essays, lectures and articles. His later election as
pope contributed strongly to the spread of personalist thought,
especially among Catholic thinkers. As Pope he continued to employ
personalist arguments in his magisterial teaching, and spurred new
interest in personalist theories. John Paul called for
“theological renewal based on the personalistic nature of
man” and explicitly invoked the personalist argument in his
encyclical letters Laborem Exercens (1981) and Ut Unum
Sint (1995) as well as his 1994 Letter to Families.

Personalism has also been represented, to varying degrees, in many
other European countries.

American personalism, best known as represented by such figures as
Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910), George H. Howison
(1834–1916), and Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953),
took a different tack from continental European personalism in that
instead of a reaction to idealism, it is often actually a form of
idealism, wherein being is defined as personal consciousness. Howison
preferred the term “personal idealism.” Contrary to
twentieth-century continental European personalism, American
personalism, in particular in its early representatives, is a direct
continuation of the development of more or less personalistic
philosophy and theology in nineteenthy-century Europe and its analysis
and refutation of various impersonalistic forms of thought. The
American and the stricter personalist twentieth-century school in
Europe agreed in taking the person as their point of departure for
understanding the world and in drawing all moral truth from the
absolute value of the person, but while the latter derived these
insights primarily from existentialism, phenomenology, and Thomism,
the American school, while in some respects adding to them and
developing them further, basically took them over from the European
“speculative theists”.

Boston University was long considered the hub of American personalism,
under the auspices of philosophy professor Borden Parker Bowne.
Bowne
was a Methodist minister who had studied under
Rudolf Hermann Lotze in Germany. Lotze, a student of the speculative
theist Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–66) who assimilated much of the
later Schelling's criticism of Hegel, sought, like the
speculative theists, to modify Hegelian idealism by maintaining that
the real is always concrete and individual, transforming Hegel's
absolute idealism into a personal idealism. Adding elements also from
recent trends in psychology, Bowne developed a distinct and explicitly
personalist position, which assumed the character of a philosophical
school. His late book Personalism, published in 1908, is a
popular summary of his philosophy which introduced the term personalism
into American philosophical and theological discourse.

Bowne gathered a group of talented disciples who carried on his work
in a second generation. The most important among these were Edgar
Sheffield Brightman, Albert C. Knudson (1873–1953), Francis
J. McConnell (1871–1953), George Albert Coe (1861–1951),
and Ralph T. Flewelling (1871–1960). While Howison had established
the personalist tradition at the University of California, Berkeley,
Flewelling took personalism to the University of Southern California,
which became the second important twentieth-century center of
personalist thought in the United States. Flewelling also
founded The Personalist, the journal that would serve as the
forum for American personalism. In 1915, he published Personalism
and the Problems of Philosophy: An Appreciation of the Work of Borden
Parker Bowne. At Boston Universtiy, Brightman continued the
studies in personalism, in time holding the Borden Parker Bowne chair
of philosophy, while Knudson, having first taught classes in the Old
Testament, moved into personalist theology. Meanwhile Walter George
Muelder (1907-), professor of social ethics and Christian theology at
Boston University and the University of Southern California, helped
bridge the gap between the Bostonian and Californian schools, calling
his doctrine “Communitarian Personalism.”

The Boston personalist school has continued to influence American
culture, sometimes in unexpected ways. A third generation of American
personalists, represented by such figures as Peter A. Bertocci
(1910–1989) and W. Gordon Allport of Harvard, a student of William
Stern, further developed the psychological dimension of
personalism. Martin Luther King studied under the personalists at
Boston University, and credited the experience with shaping his
worldview: “I studied philosophy and theology at Boston
University under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf…It was
mainly under these teachers that I studied Personalistic
philosophy—the theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate
reality is found in personality. This personal idealism remains today
my basic philosophical position. Personalism's insistence that only
personality—finite and infinite—is ultimately real
strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and
philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me
a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human
personality.”

It is important to note, however, that American personalism cannot be
reduced to the Boston University school. It flourished also at Harvard
University. Not only is this where Howison came from, but the work of
leading Harvard philosophers such as William James (1842–1910), Josiah
Royce (1855–1916), William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966), and Charles
Hartshorne (1897–2000) displays strong personalist elements. All of
them, with the sole exception of Royce, even called themselves
personalists.

In some respects close parallels to or equivalents of Western
personalism are present in Islamic, Buddhist, Vedantic, and Chinese
thought, although comparative work in this field is confronted with
often formidable problems of translation and interpretation.

With regard to Islam, it should first of all be pointed out that
classic Islamic philosophy, with its roots in classical Greek
philosophy, is not Eastern in the same sense as Buddhist, Vedantic,
Chinese, and Japanese thought. It shares roots with Augustinianism and
Thomism, and thus with some of the traditions that have been central
to the development of personalism in the West. On the other hand, it
has been observed that there is no conceptual equivalent of the
Western philosophical concept of “person” in Arabic and in
classic Islamic philosophy, something which would seem to confirm the
importance of the specifically Christian, to a considerable extent
Trinitological, terminological and conceptual origins of the term. But
as there are other sources of personalism than the Trinitological
thought that was decisive for the early formation of the concept
(when, it should also be remembered, it was not yet fully
personalistic in the modern sense), and as these sources have also
produced Jewish versions of personalism, the historical absence of a
conceptual equivalent in Arabic has not precluded the development of
Islamic personalism. Themes with regard to the self and the nature of
God which are very similar to those of Western personalists are found
in a modern Muslim thinker like Muhammad Iqbal
(1877–1938). Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1922–1993) explicitly
sought to develop a Muslim version of personalism, and was influenced
not least by Mounier.

No precise conceptual counterpart of “person” is found in
the more properly Eastern traditions of thought either, traditions
which do not share the Greek philosophical roots. When we speak of
personalism in the case of these traditions, it is in the sense of
themes and positions, elaborated in terms of other concepts, closer to
such Western ones as “self” and “individual”,
which are part of Western personalism and enter into the definition of
the modern concept of person.

The term personalism has, for instance, been applied to the early
Buddhist school called puggalavada, which takes positions
with regard to the identity and continuity of the individual self
which differ from what has traditionally been considered the orthodox
ones of Theravada Buddhism. Other versions of these positions are
found later in some of the currents of Mahayana thought.

More unambiguous parallels are found, however, in
Vedanta. The vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dualism) school
turned against advaita's radical non-dualism, and insisted
not only on what in English works by representatives of this school
and later schools which are similarly critical of advaita, is
often explicitly termed the personal concept of brahman or
the absolute, but also on a personal understanding of the individual
beings that are conceived as fragmentary selves (jivatmas)
that are “parts” — at the same time one with and
distinct transformations — of
brahman. As the different classical darshanas of
Indian thought are not wholly isolated and receive influences
from each other, elements of Samkhya thought are also taken up in
personalistic Vedanta, as are still further elements of Yoga, and of
the traditional Hindu scriptural legacy. It is the clarity, the
traditional primordiality, and the fundamental nature of the teaching
of the permanent self, the atman, in Vedanta, and not least in
the schools critical of advaita, which make this personalism
more unambiguous than puggalavada's in Buddhism.

A striking feature of the debates within Vedanta between the
non-dualist, impersonalist schools and the theistic, personalist ones
is the partial similarites with and parallels to the opposition
between nineteenth-century representatives absolute idealism and
personalistic idealism in the West, despite the distance between them
in time and space, the mutual independence, and the different
conceptual contexts. But while there is a long-standing scholarly
tradition of comparative work on
advaita Vedanta and absolute idealism (not least in F. H.
Bradley's version), only very little such work has as yet been
done on the vishishtadvaita and similar personalist Vedantic
schools and the early, idealistic personalists in the West.

What most clearly distinguishes Vedantic personalism from Western
personalism is that the former builds on the fundamental teaching
of all Vedanta that the true self exists beyond the
limitations of the transient body and the mind, and beyond the
tendency — called in Sanskrit the
ahamkara, literally, the “I-maker” — to
identify with these, whereas Western personalism is often
characteristically defined in terms which from the perspective of
Vedanta must be seen as pertaining to the mental level, or sometimes,
in particular in the twentieth century, to the physical body.

This does not mean, however, that according to personalistic Vedanta
the body should be ignored or devalued. It is from its perspective
primarily the erroneous identification with the mind that is harmful
to the body, as it indeed is to the proper use of the mind itself. The
actualization of our true and higher nature as consciousness, as
the sat-cit-ananda (being/eternity, knowledge, and bliss)
that are the nature of the
atman-brahman, brings light to both the body and the mind,
including all the faculties so closely analysed by Western
personalists, like will, imagination, and reason. Thus it at least
indirectly supports, to the extent it is needed, the moral
character-formation on the humanistic level which is emphasized by
Western personalism.

Most traditional Chinese and Japanese thought shares with personalism
an emphasis on the need for concrete, practical transformation of
character as a prerequisite for insight. In the Chinese and Japanese
versions of Buddhism, the Indian tradition of devising specific
practices and exercises for this purpose was continued, but gradually
disconnected from the parallel and very strong theoretical and
metaphysical legacy of India. This development can be said to
culminate in Zen. But the emphasis on the practical is found also in
Taoism, which contributed to the development of Zen. At the same time
all of these schools share an understanding of the ultimate or true
reality as rather impersonal than personal, which makes them further
removed from personalism than Vedanta.

Confucianism shares with the other Chinese and Japanese traditions the
emphasis on the practical. Contrary to them, however, it is focused
much more exclusively on the “humanistic” level, on moral
character-formation, and the requirements of the social order. While
its humanistic orientation is in line with personalism, Confucianism
is, however, more concerned with the practical attainment of the
general ideals of true humanity and gentlemanliness as understood in
traditional China, than with the personal individuality and uniqueness
which Western personalists stress as related to, and often indeed as
inseparable from, a true understanding and affirmation of universal
values. Neo-Confucianism, as developed by Chu Hsi (1130-1200),
introduced strong metaphysical elements, but the understanding of the
metaphysical principles or laws, li, was still a generalist
one. Other Neo-Confucians differed to some extent in this respect,
and, as Confucianism is a living tradition in today's China, new
thinkers keep developing versions of it which are closer to
personalism. This, and the importance of humanist character-formation,
speaks in favour of the designation of Confucianism in general as a
personalistic philosophy. But there are also some considerations that
speak against it, both general ones regarding some aspects of
historical Chinese society, and, in view of Chu Hsi's version of
Neo-Confucianism, metaphysical ones.

Though personalism comprises many different forms and emphases,
certain distinctive characteristics can be discerned that generally
hold for personalism as such. These include an insistence on the
radical difference between persons and non-persons and on the
irreducibility of the person to impersonal spiritual or material
factors, an affirmation of the dignity of persons, a concern for the
person's subjectivity and self-determination, and particular emphasis
on the social (relational) nature of the person.

Personalists have generally insisted on the falsity of Darwin's claim
that man's difference from other terrestrial beings is one of degree
and not of kind. Human exceptionalism has defined most personalist
thought. Obviously, such exceptionalism is not exclusive to
personalism, but represents, rather, a standard assumption of
classical philosophical anthropology. In 1625, for instance, Grotius
wrote: “Man is, to be sure, an animal, but an animal of a
superior kind, much farther removed from all other animals than the
different kinds of animals are from one another” (De iure
belli ac pacis, Prolegomena, 11).

According to a typical personalist conception, the fundamental
classification of all beings, created and uncreated, is the
distinction between persons and non-persons. For many personalists,
what makes man “unlike” other animals is different from
what makes a baboon different from a giraffe, or even from what makes
a baboon different from a rock. Thus, in the words of Jacques
Maritain: “Whenever we say that man is a person, we mean that he
is more than a mere parcel of matter, more than an individual element
in nature, such as is an atom, a blade of grass, a fly or an
elephant…Man is an animal and an individual, but unlike other
animals or individuals.” Or as William Stern wrote, in his
introduction to Person und Sache (vol. 2): “Despite any
similarities by which persons are identified as members of humankind,
a particular race or gender, etc., despite any broad or narrow
regularities which are involved in any personal events, a primal
uniqueness always remains, through which every person is a world of
its own with regard to other persons.”

Here personalists react not only to the main forms of idealism, the
materialism, and the determinism of the nineteenth century, but even
to the objectivism of Aristotle. Following his methodology for
defining a species in terms of its proximate genus and specific
difference, Aristotle had defined man as a rational animal (ho
anthropos zoon noetikon) (Aristotle,
Hist. Anim. I, 1: 488a7; Nichomachean Ethics I, 5:
1097b11; VIII, 12: 1162a16; IX, 9: 1169b18; Politics, I, 2:
1253a3). Personalists, while accepting this definition, as far as it
goes, see such a construction as an unacceptable reduction of the human
person to the objective world. This objective, cosmological view of man
as an animal with the distinguishing feature of reason—by which
man is primarily an object alongside other objects in the world to
which he physically belongs—would be only partly valid, and
insufficient. In an effort to interpret the subjectivity that is proper
to the person, personalism expresses a belief in both the non-material
dimension and the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in
the basic irreducibility of the human being to the natural world.

Many personalists see human beings as dealing with all other realities
as objects (something related intentionally to a subject), but affirm
a substantive difference between the human person and all other
objects. The person alone is “somebody” rather than
merely “something”, and this sets him apart from every
other entity in the visible world. No precise and general position
specific to personalists with regard to the nature of animals can be
discerned. But the sharp distinction between “somebody”
and “something”, in particular as applied to such other
sentient beings, reflects both the influence on personalism of the
Judaeo-Christian tradition and at least some of the general impact or
spirit of distinctly modern, Cartesian rationalism, which latter is of
course not unaffected by inherited Christian dualisms. Only the human
being is typically conceived by personalism as simultaneously object
and subject, while at the same time this is held to be true for all
persons, irrespective of age, intelligence, qualities, etc. For
personalists, personal subjectivity assures that the human being's
proper essence cannot be reduced to and exhaustively explained by the
proximate genus and specific difference. Subjectivity becomes, then, a
kind of synonym for the irreducible in the human being.

But the broader, realist personalism does posit, in the classical and
scholastic tradition, the essential difference between man and all
other objects on man's ability to reason, which differentiates a
person from the whole world of objective entities. Since it is
precisely his intellectual and spiritual nature that makes
subjectivity possible, one can say that in the subjectivity of the
human person is also something objective. Yet these personalists
insist on the clear separation between non-personal beings and this
subjectivity of the person which is derivative of his rational nature
in a broader or higher sense. Regardless of how, more precisely,
animals are to be understood, the person differs from even the most
advanced among them by a specific kind of inner self, an inner life,
which, ideally, revolves around his pursuit of truth and goodness, and
generates person-specific theoretical and moral questions and
concerns.

Other strains of personalism, such as that represented by the
dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber, pay less attention to the
difference between persons and non-persons and underscore instead the
way one relates to all of reality. Buber separates the way of dealing
with other realities into two, which he terms “I-Thou” and
“I-It” relationships, the first reflecting a fundamental
openness to the reality of the other and the latter reflecting an
objectivization and subordination of the other to oneself. According to
Buber, we engage others either as an It, forming an
I-It primary word, or as a Thou, forming the
I-Thou primary word. Yet whereas other personalists would
assert that such an I-Thou relationship is the only
appropriate way of dealing with persons, and the I-It
relationship the only appropriate way of dealing with things,
Buber presents the I-Thou relationship as the ideal for the
human person's dealing with all reality, personal and
non-personal alike. And though this I-Thou relation will
take on different characteristics according to the sphere in which the
relation arises (nature, men, spiritual beings), for Buber the
fundamental difference lies within the human person himself and in the
attitude with which he engages reality.

Some personalists have come to take a critical view of the starkly
formulated human exceptionalism, and to go further than Buber in not
just reconsidering the attitude of the human being, but also the rigid
dualism involved in the view of everything that is not human (and
divine) persons as just soulless, impersonal “objects”. The
Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák is an example of an in important
respects personalist thinker who has tried to rethink both our attitude
to and our understanding of nature in this respect. The various effort
to overcome the impersonal objectification of nature and other
life-forms, and to conceive of a more thoroughgoingly personal
universe, partly resemble the positions of some of the early idealistic
personalists in the nineteenth century. Just like these personalists
had sometimes incorporated the accumulated and interrelated insights of
self-consciousness, subjectivity, interiority,
individuality/singularity, will, imagination, and historicity in a way
which the still in some respects often somewhat one-sidedly generalist
Thomistic currents of personalism had not, they also came closer to a
view of nature that rectifies the overly rigid dualisms of a created
world at such distance from its creator as to be almost independent,
and man as almost equally sharply separated from the rest of creation.
The human form of life is clearly exceptional in that it allows a
much higher degree of development of personality in every respect, but
to regard as a corollary of this insight the position that plants and
even animals are mere impersonal objects, without consciousness and
their own kind of subjectivity, seems to be regarded as increasingly
problematic among personalists.

A not unimportant part of personalism's human
exceptionalism reflects these cleavages of a world in which the
presence of the divine is no longer sensed and perceived in nature. The
modern desacralized world, open to human exploitation, as articulated
by Cartesianism but prepared by Ockham and even in some respects by
Aquinas, is also in reality in important respects an impersonalized
world. While guarding against the new impersonalism and moral ambiguity
of the romantic pantheists, the early personalists of the nineteenth
century at least perceived clearly the problems with the stark dualisms
of much Christian theology as well as of modern rationalism, the
Enlightenment, and scientism.

In stressing the uniqueness of persons vis-à-vis all other
entities, personalists influenced by Thomism designate the essential
dividing line of reality as that which separates personal and
non-personal being. Dealings with persons, therefore, require a
different ethical paradigm from that used to describe dealings with
non-personal realities. The “rules” of dealing with
non-personal reality do not hold when dealing with persons, and
vice-versa. This radical dichotomy between persons and non-persons is
essentially ontological, but produces immediate consequences on the
ethical level.

At the center of this personalism stands an affirmation of the dignity
of the person, the quality, insisted on already by medieval thinkers,
which constitutes the unique excellence of personhood and which gives
rise to specific moral requirements. Dignity refers to the inherent
value of the person, as a “someone” and not merely
“something,” and this confers an absoluteness not found in
other beings. Here classical-realist personalists reject the Hobbesian
notion of dignity as the price set on an individual by the
commonwealth, and ally themselves rather with Kant in his assertion
that dignity is inherent and sets itself beyond all price. The
language of dignity rules out the possibility of involving persons in
a trade-off, as if their worth were a function of their utility. Every
person without exception is of inestimable worth, and no one is
dispensable or interchangeable. The person can never be lost or
assimilated fully into the collectivity, because his interrelatedness
with other persons is defined by his possession of a unique,
irreplaceable value. The agreement with Kant in this regard can be
said to constitute a bridge between personalism in the broader sense
and personalism in the narrow sense.

Attributing a unique dignity or worth to the human person also throws
light on the cardinal virtue of justice. Rendering “to each his
due” hinges on one's understanding of what each deserves, and
this cannot be correctly ascertained without taking into account the
dignity and worth that are at the same time general qualities of all
persons, and inseparable from the singularity of each of
them. Personalists in the broader sense therefore lay special stress
on what persons deserve by the very fact of their personhood, and on
the difference between acting toward a person and acting toward any
other reality. When the person is the object of one's action, a whole
ethical structure enters into play that is absent when the object of
one's action is a thing. How persons should be treated forms an
independent ethical category, separate in essence and not only in
degree from how non-persons (things) are to be treated. Whereas
traditional ethical systems stress the internal mechanisms of the
moral agent (conscience, obligation, sin, virtue, etc.) and the effect
that free actions have on moral character, personalists add to this a
particular concern for the transcendent character of human action and
the dignity of the one being acted upon. The person's absolute
character provides for the possibility of absolute moral norms when
dealing with persons.

For personalists, human dignity as such does not depend on variables
such as native intelligence, athletic ability or social prowess. Nor
can it result merely from good conduct or moral merit. It must rather
be rooted in human nature itself, so that on the deepest level,
despite the variations of moral conduct and the resultant differences
in moral character, all members of the species share this dignity. The
difference between being something and someone has been seen as so
radical that it does not admit of degrees. Most personalists have
denied that personhood is something that can be gradually attained. It
is like a binary function (1 or 0) or a toggle switch (on or off),
that admits no middle ground.

But as we have seen, these positions can be related to a not wholly
unproblematic view of non-human nature. Personalists in the narrow
sense accept, as far as it goes, the view of the dignity of man as
found in Kant's ethics or practical philosophy, but modify and add to
it not least from the perspective of a more thoroughgoingly
personalist understanding of the importance of individual
uniqueness. And since they do not merely emphasize the importance of
the person within the framework of a pre-existing metaphysics and a
philosophical and theological anthropology, there is available to them
a theoretical space for conceiving of the non-human world of
“somethings” in a less objectifying and exploitative
manner. The early, idealistic personalists were much more inclined to
see external nature too as ultimately expressive of personal reality,
and to account for its impersonal appearance in terms of the
limitations of finite perception.

Personalists assert that only persons are truly
“subjects.” This is not to say that in the syntactic sense
other entities do not “act” or “produce” or
“cause,” but properly speaking they do not possess
subjectivity. In the modern sense, subjectivity depends primarily on
the unity of self-consciousness, and on interiority, freedom, and
personal autonomy. Though non-personal beings may “act” in
the syntactic sense, they are not truly subjects of action since the
cause of their action is extrinsic to them. Despite the difference
with regard to the ultimate nature of the “non-personal”
between some personalists in the narrow sense and personalists in the
broader sense, there is in this area a considerable overlap between
the two forms of personalism. Personal subjectivity embraces the moral
and religious dimensions, which are part and parcel of the person's
nature as a conscious, intelligent, free, willing subject in relation
with God and others. As free, thinking subjects, persons also exercise
creativity through their thought, imagination, and action, a
creativity which affects both the surrounding world and the person
himself. Furthermore, personalists have observed that the lived
experience of the human person, as a conscious and self-conscious
being, discloses not only actions but also
inner happenings that depend upon the self. These
experiences, lived in a conscious way, go into the makeup and
uniqueness of the person as well. As regards the ethical question, not
only are persons free and responsible moral subjects, but their
subjectivity also conditions others' ethical responsibility toward
them.

What we perceive as “things” can be examined and known
from the outside, as what is regarded as “objects”. In a
sense, they stand in front of us, they present themselves to us, but
always as outside of us. They can be described, qualified, and
classified. Classical-realist personalists accept the legitimacy, even
necessity, of knowing man too in this way. From this objective
viewpoint it is possible to discern some of the superiority of the
human being to the rest of reality. Yet in the human person, a
thoroughly unique dimension presents itself, a dimension not found in
the rest of reality. Human persons experience themselves first of all
not as objects but as subjects, not from the outside but from the
inside, and thus they are present to themselves in a way that no other
reality can be present to them. But here the influence and value of
the phenomenological method, as well as of aspects of the earlier
idealistic tradition, often makes itself especially felt in
personalism and adds to the classical-realist analysis. The essence of
the person is explored as an intuition from the inside, rather than as
a deduction from a system of thought or through empirical observation
in the ordinary sense. The human being must be treated as a subject,
must be understood in terms of the modern view of specifically human
subjectivity as determined by consciousness. But this contribution is
not conceived by personalists as simply replacing in every respect
earlier, more objectivist notions of man, but quite as much as
complementing them.

This conscious self-presence is the interiority of the human person,
and it is so central to the meaning of the concept of person that one
can say that personality signifies interiority to self. Because of the
person's subjectivity, he is not only acted upon and moved by external
forces, but also acts from within, from the core of his own
subjectivity. Since he is the author of his actions, he possesses an
identity of his own making, which cannot be reduced to objective
analysis and thus resists definition. This resistance to definition,
this irreducibility, do not mean that the person's subjectivity and
lived experience are unknowable, but rather that we must come to know
them differently, by a method that merely reveals and discloses their
essence. In lived experience of self-possession and self-governance,
one experiences that one is a person and a subject, and through
sympathy and empathy one experiences the personhood of
others. To apply the early terminology with some added modern
meanings, the person comprises both an objective subsistence
(ύπόστασις) and a
subjective subsistence
(πρόσωπον).

A conclusion of personalism is that the experience of the human being
cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction. We must pause at
the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each
human being, that by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular
human being—an individual of a certain species—but a
personal subject. This is the only way to come to a true understanding
of the human being. Obviously the framework of the irreducible is not
exhaustive of the human condition, and such an understanding must be
supplemented by a cosmological perspective. Nevertheless, personalists
would say it is impossible to come to a true understanding of the
person while neglecting his subjectivity.

The focus on the subjectivity of persons explains many personalists'
insistence on the difference between the concept of
“person” and that of “individual.” Gilson
wrote that “every human person is first an individual, but he is
much more than an individual, since one only speaks of a person, as of
a personage, when the individual substance under consideration
possesses in his own right a certain dignity.” The major
distinction is that an individual represents a single unit in
a homogenous set, interchangeable with any other member of the set,
whereas a person is characterized by his uniqueness and
irreplaceability.

Von Balthasar, for example, wrote: “Few words have as many
layers of meaning as
person. On the surface it means just any human being, any
countable individual. Its deeper senses, however, point to the
individual's uniqueness which cannot be interchanged and
therefore cannot be counted.” In this deeper sense persons
cannot, properly speaking, be counted, because a single person is not
merely one in a series within which each member is identical to the
rest for all practical purposes and thus exchangeable for any other.
One can count apples, because one apple is as good as another (i.e.,
what matters is not that it is this apple, but simply that it
is an apple), but one cannot count persons in this
way. One could count human beings, as individuals of the same species,
but the word person emphasizes the uniqueness of each member
of the human species, his incommensurability and incommunicability. Von
Balthasar goes on to say: “If one distinguishes between
individual and person (and we should for the sake of
clarity), then a special dignity is ascribed to the person, which the
individual as such does not possess…We will speak of a
‘person’…when considering the uniqueness, the
incomparability and therefore irreplaceability of the
individual.”

As valid as these philosophical distinctions are, whether one speaks
of a human individual or a human person, these are simply two names
applied to the same reality. Personalists are quick to assert that
personality is not superadded to humanity, but a quality of every
human being. “Human person” and “human
individual,” while underscoring different dimensions of a human
being, are synonymous in everyday language and have the same
referent. Some thinkers have proposed a real distinction between a
human person and a human individual. From their perspective,
personhood would be an acquired “extra” for a human being,
a status reached not simply by being an individual of the species, but
by entering into certain relationships with other persons in a
conscious, intentional way. In other words, while all human persons
would be human individuals, the reverse would not be true.

Personalists typically reject this, and insist that each living human
being normally possesses—actually and not merely potentially,
although the importance of further development or actualization is
strongly stressed—the definitional and constitutive
consciousness, intentionality, will etc., the radical capacity to
reason, laugh, love, and choose. These are not just some abstractly
conceivable common characteristics of a species, but aspects of the
unique, individual, organic functioning of every human being. In this
way, personalists see personhood as subsisting even while its
operations come and go with many changing factors such as immaturity,
injury, sleep, and senility.

Man's intellectual nature, which according to Boethius is the
distinguishing characteristic of personhood, is also the font of
freedom, subjectivity, immortality, and man's cognitive and moral
life. It is as a rational being, and therefore as a person, that the
individual can distinguish true from false and good from
evil. Therefore science and morality are proper to persons. Because
the person possesses a spiritual nature, the source of its action is
internal to itself and not extrinsic.

Personalists insist that in his contact with the world the human
person acts not in a purely mechanical or deterministic way, but from
the inner self, as a subjective “I,” with the power of
self-determination. Possession of free will means that the human
person is his own master (sui iuris). Self-mastery and
freedom characterize personal beings; a free being is a person. The
person's power of self-determination explains the non-transferable
nature of personality. His incommunicability does not only refer to
the person's uniqueness and unrepeatability. What is incommunicable or
inalienable in a person is intrinsic to that person's inner self and
to the power of self-determination. No one can substitute his act of
will for another's.

In what does self-determination consist? A classic distinction
separates “human acts” (actus humani) from
so-called “acts of man” (actus hominis). An act
of man describes something that “happens” in the subject
whereas a properly human act ascribes free and responsible authorship
of the act to the subject. The element of interior causality is
referred to as self-determination. This self-determination involves a
sense of efficacy on the part of the acting subject, who recognizes
that “I act” means that “I am the efficient
cause” of my action. One's sense of efficacy as an acting person
in relation to the action performed is in turn closely connected to
one's sense of responsibility for the activity. This experience on the
phenomenological level draws attention to the will as the person's
power of self-determination, while at the same time making clear that
self-determination is a property of the person himself, and not just
of the will. It is the freedom of the person as such, through his
will.

Yet self-determination does not only describe the causality of the
action, but also of the one acting. In acting, the person not only
directs himself toward a value, he determines himself as
well. He is not only the efficient cause of his actions, but is also
in some sense the creator of himself, especially his moral self. By
choosing to carry out good or bad actions, man makes himself a morally
good or bad human being. Action is organically linked to becoming. By
free moral action the personal subject becomes good or bad as a human
being. When a person acts, he acts intentionally toward an object, a
value which attracts the will to itself. At the same time,
self-determination points inward toward the subject himself. As a
result of this, the human being is capable of existing and acting
“for itself,” or is capable of a
certain autoteleology. This means that the person determines
not only his own ends but also becomes an end for himself. The person
is not only responsible for his actions, he is also responsible for
himself, for his moral character and identity. Freedom means that one
is responsible for one's choices but also for one's self.

Freedom and self-determination also bear a close relation to another
characteristic of the person's spiritual nature: creativity. Freedom
as a property of the person allows the person to create through
thought and action. The will is not simply the executor of the
intellect's reasoned conclusions. The intellect presents a variety of
goods to be realized, none of which imposes itself in such a way as to
be necessarily desired or chosen above the others. The person himself
decides spontaneously and freely, and thus determines his own moral
value and identity. “This particular good I am choosing has
value for me according to the ‘me’ that I freely desire
and choose to be.”

Personalists stress the person's nature as a social being. According
to personalists, the person never exists in isolation, and moreover
persons find their human perfection only in communion with other
persons. Interpersonal relations, consequently, are never superfluous
or optional to the person, but are constitutive of his inherent
make-up and vocation.

Relation is proper only to the person. Personalism has endeavored to
highlight this aspect of personhood and bring it to the fore. It is
central to personalism's reaction against and endeavor to overcome the
polarization of individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the
other. Personalists consider the human being as a “being for
others.” Relationship is not an optional accessory for the human
person, but is essential to his personhood. He is a
being-for-relation.

Personalists recognize that as much as he may strive for independence,
the human person necessarily relies on others. He depends on other
persons for his survival and development, and this interdependence is
a hallmark of human existence. Beyond this, the human person also
tends toward society as a basic human value. Such society is not only
a matter of utility or convenience but reflects an innate tendency of
the person to seek out his fellows and enter into spiritual
association with them. The trait of sociableness has been observed
since the earliest philosophers, and reflects both man's dependence on
other people for his subsistence and development, and his vocation to
deeper communion.

Some personalists note that man's social nature and his vocation to
inter-personal communion are not the same thing. Their capacity for
rational community and friendship is one of the things that make human
beings social. But the person's capacity for communion is according to
these personalists deeper than mere
sociability. “Society,” in fact, is sometimes analogously
applied to non-personal beings that live and interact as a group
rather than in isolation from one another, whereas the word communion
could never be understood in this way.
Communio does not simply refer to something common, but rather
to a mode of being and acting in common through which the persons
involved mutually confirm and affirm one another, a mode of being and
acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of each of them by virtue
of their mutual relationship. This mode of being and acting is an
exclusive property of persons.

Personalists see the human person's vocation to communion as rooted in
rational nature, through the person's subjectivity and
self-determination. Far from closing the person in on himself, these
characteristics of the person's spiritual nature dispose him to
communication with other persons. For most personalists, the
subjectivity of the person has nothing in common with the isolated
unity of the Leibnitzian monad but requires the communication of
knowledge and love.

This communication, in turn, depends on
the person's self-determination with its distinctive structure of
self-possession and self-governance. As a free, willing subject, the
person cannot be possessed by another, unless he chooses to make a
gift of himself to another. Personalists assert that the person
belongs to himself in a way that no other thing or animal
can. Self-possession does not imply isolation. On the contrary, both
self-possession and self-governance imply a special disposition to
make “a gift of oneself.” Only if one possesses oneself
can one give oneself and do this in a disinterested way. And only if
one governs oneself can one make a disinterested gift of oneself. This
vocation to self-giving is so essential to the constitution of the
person that it is precisely when one becomes a gift for others that
one most fully becomes oneself. Without a disinterested gift of self
man cannot achieve the finality that is proper to a human being by
virtue of his being a person, and cannot fully discover his true
self.

For personalists, this “law of the gift” shows that the
relation and the society of which the person alone is capable, and
which are necessary for his realization as a person, consist not only
in association, but in love. They consist in a love which gives and
gives itself, which receives not only things but other persons as
well. Only persons can give love and only persons can receive
love.